Category Archives: Law

Driverless cars aren’t without ethical quandaries

Posted on by

While driving home the other day I was thinking about the new Google Driverless car stuff that I’ve seen. It’s an interesting looking vehicle, see it below. Apparently, one of the reasons why Google went fully autonomous was that people would be first hyper vigilant, then so lazy that they completely trusted the car in any and every situation.

Google’s fully automated driverless car

I believe it’s likely that the first round of driverless cars won’t be fully automated. Data will eventually show that the fully automated cars are perfectly safe, but we’re a paranoid lot when it comes to new technology. I also think that there are definitely risks with a fully autonomous car in regard to hacking and spoofing the system. I have a feeling that will become a game with hackers to try to trick the car into thinking that a direction is safe when it is actually not. To continually combat these risks Google will have to make it very easy to update the software, possibly while driving, as well as the hardware. I believe this is one of the many reasons why Google just announced their 180 internet satellites that they will be launching soon.

However, I think that the best of intentions will likely lead to some serious issues for Google and law makers in the next few years. For some of them an author at the Guardian wrote a few of them. That being said, I think that the first cars will not be fully automatic until enough data comes into show they are safe going highway speeds consistently. I think that this will lead to issues for Google.

One of the things that is missed in the Guardian article above is that if you’re an Android user, those very things could happen already. Your phone already tracks not just GPS but also nearby cell towers, so you could very easily subpoena either Google or your cell provider for records of your whereabouts. However, the interesting thing that Google talks about in regard to safety, is that drunk driving will be a think of the past.

As I mentioned before I think that there will be a manual mode and I think there will have to be one for a while because of definite hacker threats. You’d need to override. I also think that this would require a mechanical switch that literally overrides the system. The system would still run, but would not be able to override the human driver. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I don’t think that anyone can create a truly secure vehicle like this and if one is compromised then all of them would be under the exact same risk.

Now, let’s say a guy goes out drinking. Google knows where he is. Google knows that he took pictures of his shots Instagraming “#drinktilyoublackout!”. Google also knows that he texted a few friends through Hangouts fully integrated texting capability. Furthermore, he tweets to @Google “Getting Black out drunk no #DD #DriverlessFTW”. This guy then gets into the car, switches it to manual override for whatever reason gets in an accident, who is at fault here? Clearly the guy that’s driving right? Well, if he had a fully automated car with no other option he’d not hurt anyone. Google knows everything he’s doing. Google knows everywhere you go already because of how their devices work. The difference is now that they can control where you’re going and how you get there.

Is Google responsible for building a car with a manual override that could save people’s lives in other instances? Is the State responsible for mandating that Google put in that switch? Should Google have built in safety measures that make the user go through a series of actions or prove the driver is capable of overriding the car?

I think that we need to hash out all of these before these cars are allowed on the road. I also think it’s going to be vitally important that we understand what happens with that data from all our cars, who can access it, and if we really have any privacy in a fully automated car like that. Simply by participating in our culture with a cell phone we’ve already eroded our privacy a great deal in both the public and private realm. Driverless cars will further impact that and will likely end up being a highly political issue over the next several years. Taxis, Lyft, and Uber will be out of business – the Car2Go model will beat them out any day of the week if the cars are autonomous. Direct to customers, like Tesla is pretty obvious. Lots of changes are going to happen through these cars.

We can’t just let this happen to us, we need to make decisions about how we want to include driverless cars in our lives. They aren’t inevitable and definitely not in their current incarnation.

Comcast and regulation

Posted on by

I believe that the 300 GB data cap that Comcast is tossing around is tomorrow’s 640k predictions from Microsoft. In 5 years when they are claiming to plan to implement it, 300GB will be woefully small. As it stands many games are 50GB and likely will only grow. As will the size of our movies we stream and other services that will develop in the next five years.

Comcast’s arrogant attitude towards it’s customers can only be described economically in one way: market failure.  If we had a strong competitive telecom market, Comcast would not be able to dictate prices in this way. We know this is true because we can see prices AND speeds that are significantly better elsewhere in the world.

There are two other results of this market failure, pushing regulation that prevents competition and preventing regulation that would prevent a foreclosure of another market. I’ll start with the regulation preventing competition.

In my last blog I mentioned an idea call private public partnership. This is the concept of a municipality working with a private enterprise to spread the risk of implementing a local high speed network because one of the big players won’t. Comcast and other telecoms have pushed and been successful at making these partnerships illegal in a few states. This means a small rural community can’t develop their own fiber network if comcast doesn’t do it for them. It also means a big city like New York couldn’t either. This type of regulation only hurts competition and helps comcast control the market. In the US these partnerships have worked well. Provo Utah sold theirs to Google.

The other way that Comcast is using this market failure is to push the idea that net neutrality is regilation. It is a bit, because it prevents comcast from using a monopoly to foreclose another market. This is what Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer.  Leveraging the monopoly of Windows to push out other browsers. In the EU the ruling against MS really help other browsers immediately. Comcast will likely try a similar tactic with their Xfinity platform by never having it count against your data cap. Pushing people to their platform and squeezing out Netflix.

The play to get Netflix to pay them is a long term play, hurts Netflix now, but essentially will be funding further development of Xfinity.  Don’t forget, Xfinity will likely get Universal content earlier as they own that conent. This will give their platform a distinct advantage over Netflix. It’s pretty obvious to everyone that the future of in home entertainment is streaming content. Hence, Google looking to buy Twitch.

Comcast is using the anti – regulation faction to fight net neutrality while leveraging that same group’s anti- government sentiment to prevent novel forms of competition to exploit customers and move into new markets. This is a dangerous problem because they will keep doing this to push out other competitors.

Book Review: The People’s Platform: Taking back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

Posted on by

I just finished reading “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age” by Astra Taylor  I really found this book to be interesting. I believe it offered a very different critique on the digital age than Evegny Morozov’s “Click here to Save everything” where he focused on the arrogance of the algorithm and total solutionism of the movement, Taylor focused on the cultural cost of our digital economy. I think combined the philosophizing of Morozov with Taylor’s discussion of the value of culture and the economic forces behind these changes is an extremely powerful argument. Alone they are both excellent, but I think they offer balancing points that compliment each other well.

First of all, I don’t think everyone will like this book. I don’t think a lot of my readers will like large portions of the book. However, even the most libertarian will agree with some portions of it. I think that’s the power of this book. It’s not really fair to one side or the other, although is really obvious she has a bias – which she wears pretty proudly. Knowing this bias is there allows the reader to decide which portion is Occupy Wall street dreaming or which is really a problem (of course one can go too far either direction).

Taylor’s cultural argument is powerful because we are all part of that economy. We all consume cultural artifacts or perhaps, like myself, make them. The fact that these have been commoditzed to a cost of nothing while still valuable is something we deal with daily. The choice between pirating a movie, renting, streaming it on Netflix, or buying it all are choices we decide on a regular basis. I think that even the most hardcore pirate buys a lot of cultural goods.

Many of us, even if we don’t produce cultural goods, know someone that does. You might watch a video game streamer, you might have a friend or two that are in various bands, you might read my blog or another friend’s blog. All of these people want to use these artifacts to either live on or perhaps enhance their career in some fashion.

However, in the digital space most of the companies that share or distribute cultural activities are funded by ads. Twitch makes most of it money from ads, Google makes $50 billion/year on ads, Facebook makes the most money on an ad whenever a friend “Sponsors” that ad with or without our active agreement to “sponsor” the ad.

Taylor argues that we need to help develop a cultural public space that helps create value for other cultural goods that you may not actually consume (which is why I wrote this blog).

Many of the ideas in the book are anti-corporation, but not because they make money. Instead, it’s because they make money in ways that aren’t obviously ads and that control our cultural destiny. She is pro-net neutrality, she supports companies making profits from ads, but she argues for more transparency that an article is actually sponsored.

Her argument isn’t that we should tear down companies, but instead that we pull back some of the power that these companies have simply taken without any real conversation. We need to look at the ethics behind the algorithms they are using and understand their biases. We need to enable true conversations about these topics. Ad driven content leads to self-censorship and lower quality products.

Is this book perfect? Not by a long shot, but it really made me think about some topics and I think that we need to have more conversations about not just ads, but also about why companies behave the way they do. We need to find a better balance than we currently have.

I rate the book 5/5 for making me really think about topics

Should we celebrate about Google joining net neutrality fight?

Posted on by

It’s time we be skeptical of high tech companies that support policies that we want. Today, a large number of tech companies came out against the FCC’s plan to allow internet fast lanes. They aren’t as bold as Mozilla in their claims, they don’t push for the most extreme best for the consumer perspective. We, as consumers, have to understand there’s a reason for this. These companies (and there are a lot) wrote the letter without stating what their position actually is, just that they are for a “free and open internet.” This is essentially a dream statement for a lawyer/lobbyist, because “free” and “open” can mean a variety of things based on that company’s perspective.

These companies are willing to push for a free/open internet insofar as it enables them to make money. We have to understand that. Many of these companies are looking to disrupt incumbent market players and are leveraging the internet to enable them to do that.

Normally, I’d be really excited about all these companies coming out in favor of net neutrality. However, because of their tepid support, their lack of recommendations of what to do to address the net neutrality issue, and tardiness to the conversation I’m concerned as to what their actual motives are for this debate. This is a very different discussion than SOPA, where just coming out against the bill was enough. In this case it’s not, we need them to provide clear direction on what the FCC SHOULD do instead. This provides the FCC a path forward and a way to drive the conversation. Without that, essentially there’s no clearly articulated alternative during THIS debate. Yes, they’ve made an argument before, but they aren’t this time.

I also am concerned by this turn of events because of the recent report that Google and the NSA had a very close relationship. In very strict version of net neutrality deep packet inspection wasn’t possible because there was no way to actually do it. The first step to packet discrimination is knowing what’s in the material. Truly end-to-end net neutrality precludes the ability to eavesdrop and snoop on content being passed along the IP backbone. Any sort of relationship between the NSA and arguably the largest internet company in the world necessarily limits the full extent that Net Neutrality can actually be implemented.

Furthermore, we also must remember that a large number of these companies that are now for Net Neutrality were also for CISPA which includes handing over data to the government. Which, based on Google’s relationship with the NSA, they essentially did anyway.

So, it’s a good thing that these companies came out for Net Neutrality because truly only the power of their lobbying can overcome the FCC’s proposal and push Comcast and Verizon into accept the new rules. I don’t think that we citizens could do it on our own.

(if you want to try to fight corruption that’s sort of on display here, check out Mayone.us)

Kickstarter to end Government Corruption

Posted on by

In my blog yesterday I talked about the value of culture, we know that it intrinsically has value because all participate in it – we just don’t want to pay for that culture. Serious problems. One of the biggest conflicts we have right now is within the internet users relates to content and other cultural icons. A lot of people want it to be easily accessible and other people want it tightly controlled. This of course has been playing out in our courts over the past decade or so.

One of the first people that’s influenced me in regard to culture and sharing and so on, has been Lawrence Lessig. He’s written a few really accessible books about copy right. However, he’s since moved on from fighting copyright extremism to fighting corruption in the US government. I wrote a review about his first book in this arena, he’s written two other since. He’s a big fan of how the internet works and truly believes in platforms like kickstarter (Which could help address some of my concerns from yesterday over keeping a vibrant market place of cultures).

To this end, he’s decided to create a super pac in the spirit of a Kickstarter campaign. He’s calling it MayOne in honor of “May Day” admitting that he’s using it as a call for help. A call to help fix the US government.

I think that this platform offers an interesting opportunity for all of those folks out there that hate our current political system. The initial campaign is to influence 5 congressional seats as well as push for 5 specific acts that will create real reform. Here’s a link to the reform bills they’d want to push form.

I’ve pledged money for this. Why? Because I think that we need to create change in the US government and I believe that Lessig’s plan has the best chance to work. He’s taking the long view and has a real plan for driving change. It’s not going to be an immediate fix it’s going to take several years for real change to happen. This is also a way to influence change with only a few dollars. The goal is to raise $1 million and Lessig will match that million. Their next goal is 5 million, which he will then also match setting up the war chest for 2016. His goal is to help get multiple reform candidates elected to effect change.

I think that this is a way forward and that most of the candidates that MayOne will support will also support things like Net Neutrality, Copyright reform, and similar topics that most of my readers are concerned with.